José de la Luz Sáenz,1 the author of the only extant war diary published by a World War I doughboy of Mexican origin, was born on May 17, 1888, in Realitos, Texas.2 His widowed paternal grandmother, Marcelina, moved her family from the Mexican border town of Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas, to San Diego, Texas, in the 1860s to work for a Mexican family with ranch properties that extended into Texas.3 The arrival of a family on its way from San Antonio to Mexico led to the expansion of the Sáenz household when the newcomers’ daughter, Cristina Hernández, stayed in Realitos to marry Rosalío, one of Marcelina’s sons. Their union produced six children, including José de la Luz Sáenz. His first name, José de la Luz, suggests an abiding Christian faith as it denotes the biblical José and the heavenly message that he received and obeyed. This association with the divine may explain why Mexican parents give both boys and girls the name “Luz,” a term Sáenz family members affectionately used with him. His adult friends and colleagues preferred his surname. I defer to this more formal salutation.4
The young Sáenz-Hernández family led a difficult life that depended on Rosalío’s meager earnings as an itinerant railroad worker and migratory farm laborer. Cristina’s passing, on June 28, 1896, brought even greater hardship, as Rosalío now had to depend on the help of relatives and his oldest daughter, Marcelina, to care for their home and raise the children. Sáenz, who was eight years old when his mother died, recalled spending time with other relatively unsupervised boys, seeking youthful adventures in the ubiquitous chaparral brush. Rosalío’s concern with the welfare of his children may have contributed to his decision in 1900 to marry a woman named Petra Ramos. According to Sáenz, Petra raised them with the same deep love that they had been accustomed to receiving from Cristina. Soon after their marriage, Rosalío and Petra made another important decision: they moved the family to the nearby town of Alice so the children could attend school. This move had a profoundly positive effect on Sáenz’s social and intellectual development.
Six years later, at eighteen years of age, Sáenz graduated from the town’s public high school with an exemplary academic record. He also completed studies in two independently operated community schools, each taught by local intellectuals named Pablo Pérez and Eulalio Velázquez. The latter was the editor of El Cosmopolíta, a well-known newspaper in South Texas.5 The lower incidence of school segregation in the predominantly Mexican region of South Texas where the Sáenz’s family lived explains his fortuitous opportunity to obtain a public education. Although he was able to enter a public school, this did not shield him from racial discrimination, as we shall later see. Private learning institutions were also present in some communities to supplement the official curriculum because the public schools either misrepresented or entirely excluded Mexican history and culture, even in places like South Texas. The Pérez and Velázquez schools appear to have offered a third alternative. They provided instruction in Spanish and taught Mexican history and culture by choice, and not as merely a response to school segregation and exclusion. Sáenz’s broad educational experience accounts for his intellectual confidence and curiosity in adulthood, and for the noticeable skill with which he expressed encyclopedic knowledge in his diary.6
The schools he attended prepared Sáenz in nonacademic ways as well. He remembered fights with Anglo youth and confrontations with teachers in the public school—experiences that encouraged him to develop self-pride and a righteous sense of responsibility to defend his community. Some teachers in the public school stood out as caring and effective instructors, however. They helped Sáenz develop the confidence to stand up to discrimination and other subtler forms of racist behavior. He reserved his highest praise for his Mexican teachers, especially Velázquez, who modeled civic participation and opened his apparently vast personal library (which included among its many subjects books on Mexican history and culture) to Sáenz and other students.7
If the public school provided Sáenz with a mostly instrumentalist and practical form of education and the Mexican schools a more culturally affirming type of learning through a curriculum that emphasized an exalted form of Mexico’s history and culture, the lessons he received from the Mexican community and at home gave special meaning to both. His difficult experiences as a young migrant worker, traveling with his father to the cotton fields of South and Central Texas, and exposure to stories of violence toward Mexicans in the region where he grew up had already implanted in Sáenz an awareness of the racially charged environment that victimized Mexicans and found daily expression in his public school. Also, Sáenz acknowledged a home-based Mexican education that included the use of Spanish as well as a family history of epic proportions. His mother, Cristina Hernández, was descended from the Canary Island settlers of San Antonio. His father’s family traced its lineage from members of the Aztec communities that escaped the violence of the Spanish conquest in 1519 and made their way from the central valley of Mexico to the present-day Mexico-Texas border in the late nineteenth century.8 Although the Mexican schools Sáenz attended may not have explicitly incorporated such home-based knowledge of high drama and decline, they reinforced it. Velázquez, for instance, shared with students his deep admiration for Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian who served as president of Mexico between 1858 and 1864. He also no doubt underscored Juárez’s important role in unifying the nation during the French intervention in Mexico in the early 1860s. Juárez led the resistance as an inspiring head of state on the run and resumed the presidency after the defeat of the French. Velázquez also encouraged a small group of graduating students, including Sáenz, to organize a public commemoration of Juárez. Sáenz later recalled that organizing the event and serving as its principal orator gave prideful expression to his deeply held Mexican and indigenous identity.
When a group of parents from El Palo del Oso, a nearby community of railroad workers, read about the Juárez program and Sáenz’s leading role in it, they immediately offered him a teaching job in a private Mexican school they named La Escuela Laica Vicente Lozano. Still young but clearly mature for his age, Sáenz accepted the offer to teach children during the day and adults in the evening.9 He stayed in El Palo del Oso for about three years and continued teaching throughout South and Central Texas for well over forty years. By the time of his death in 1953, he had taught all grades in thirty public schools and served as a principal in elementary schools and high schools in the Texas communities of La Joya, Benavides, Oilton, and McAllen. According to one of his grown children, Sáenz often moved because he always protested the segregation of Mexican children, thus angering local school officials.10
By the 1910s, Sáenz had found his way to the area south and southeast of San Antonio. There he worked mostly in public, but separate, Mexican elementary schools and established himself as a respected educator and frequent critic of segregation and discrimination against Mexican youth in the schools. While living in Moore, he joined the Mexican Protective Association, a federation of mutual aid societies in Central Texas, and involved himself in organizing Mexican patriotic celebrations and school-related activities. He married María Petra Esparza from San Agustín, a small Mexican-origin community founded and settled by the Esparza family. San Agustín is located near Pleasanton, about fifty miles south of San Antonio, where Sáenz taught in a separate Mexican elementary school. María Petra, who was born in August 1898, was a descendant of José María (Gregorio) Esparza, who died defending the mission known as the Alamo during the famous battle that took place there in 1836.11 Sáenz and María Petra raised nine children (Adán, María de la Luz, Evangelina Lucía, Eduardo Francisco, Enrique León, Eva Olivia, Cristina Antonia, Beatriz, and José de la Luz). Between the 1910s and the 1950s, the family lived in Moore, New Braunfels, Pleasanton, Poteet, Alice, Premont, Peñitas, La Joya, and McAllen.12 Sáenz was teaching Mexican children in San Agustín in 1917, when the US government began calling on all able-bodied men between nineteen and forty years old to register for the military draft. Although he could have secured an exemption from military service due to his position as the head of a household with children, Sáenz registered and joined the army in February 1918. His diary provides a detailed account of the next sixteen months of his life, from enlistment through discharge.
Sáenz resumed his political work in the community when he returned from the war in 1919. One of his most popular initiatives involved a campaign to build a statue in San Antonio to commemorate the contributions of Mexican soldiers in World War I.13 His efforts included giving lectures sponsored by Mexican organizations throughout South and Central Texas, writing letters to potential supporters, and submitting articles for publication in newspapers like the San Antonio daily, La Prensa. Sáenz also continued to speak out against the discrimination and segregation that plagued Texas schools, and he called on Mexicans to engage racial problems by increasing their participation at the polls and in other aspects of the civic life of the community.14
In the late 1920s, Sáenz began a long association with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). The organization became known for advancing what historians have come to call an ethnic, or Mexican Americanist, political identity and for promoting a strategy for securing constitutional rights through claims of citizenship. He joined with such civil rights political stalwarts as Alonso Perales, an attorney from San Antonio, and José Tomás Canales, a former school official and state representative from Brownsville, in a campaign to form the first statewide civil rights organization. Their initial attempt failed when most of the Mexico-born delegates representing mutual aid societies bolted the 1927 meeting. They accused Perales of seeking to establish an organization exclusively for US-born Mexicans. Sáenz, Perales, Canales, and other civil rights activists from South Texas regrouped and established LULAC in 1929. The organization focused on US citizens of Mexican origin, although the leadership often claimed to be speaking for the entire population of Mexicans living in the United States.15
In addition to his extensive postwar efforts to find funding for the statue to commemorate his fellow soldiers’ patriotism and bravery during World War I, Sáenz was involved in securing financial support for the historic Salvatierra v. Del Rio antisegregation case of 1933.16 Possibly because of his frustration in raising enough funds for the statue, he turned the money he had collected over to the legal fight. Although the Salvatierra verdict did not outlaw discrimination against Mexican children when pedagogical reasons were used to justify their segregation, it favored the plaintiffs by acknowledging the segregation of Mexican children. Sáenz’s financial contribution was a lesser-known detail in the historic legal fight, yet it serves as a symbolic tribute to the military service and battlefield sacrifice of Mexican soldiers in World War I.
Places in Texas mentioned by Sáenz in his diary
Sáenz was known for his numerous political essays, published in both English- and Spanish-language newspapers, in which he sharply condemned discrimination and inequality.17 He also worked on behalf of Mexican candidates for public office, especially in South Texas, where Mexican American voters represented a significant portion of the electorate. He did much of this work as a member of various local and statewide organizations with a civil rights focus. During his more than forty years of activism and public service, Sáenz worked especially closely with LULAC and parent-student organizations, as well as with the American GI Forum, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the American Council of Spanish Speaking Persons, La Sociedad Mutualista of Sacred Heart Church (McAllen), and the Texas Good Relations Association.18 He took special pride in his work with LULAC, including his role in its organizing campaigns, its founding convention in Corpus Christi, and its eventual status as the leading Mexican American civil rights organization in the country.
When Sáenz’s life ended in 1953, Alonso Perales, perhaps the best-known Mexican civil rights figure in Texas, described him as “one of our most distinguished and honest leaders in the United States of America.”19 Santos de la Paz of Corpus Christi, the editor of the weekly paper La Verdad and a popular civil rights leader in the Gulf Coast area, added that Sáenz was a man of “true civic courage.”20 The editors of La Prensa offered this extraordinary praise:
Profesor Sáenz always distinguished himself with his love and interest for the people of Mexican origin in this country. He always defended them when it was necessary and few people were speaking out. Consequently, his passing is without a doubt an irreparable loss for our people in the United States, especially in the state of Texas.21
Sáenz’s diary, a handsome, cloth-covered, 298-page book titled Los méxico-americanos en la Gran Guerra y su contingente en pro de la democracia, la humanidad, y la justicia details his thoughts, observations, and interactions with fellow military men as a newly recruited private in the 360th Infantry Regiment of the 90th Division of the US Army, over a sixteen-month period beginning in 1918. The book was published in 1933 by the San Antonio–based Artes Gráficas, one of the most successful publishers of literary and historical works in the Americas.22 Friends, most of whom were fellow veterans and civil rights activists from South and Central Texas, made the publication possible with subscriptions, or advanced payments, for part of the $4 cost of the diary. Sáenz salutes these benefactors, noting at the end of the diary that “they deserve to be called collaborators because this publication would not have been possible without their help.”
The diary draws on wartime notes Sáenz had entered into small, bound travel guides, blank-page booklets, the backs of postcards, loose sheets of paper, letters to his loved ones, and articles that he submitted to La Prensa. He sent most of these notes home during the war, asking friends and relatives to keep the materials, as well as copies of his articles, so that he could later review and prepare everything for publication as a diary. Few copies of the published volume have survived, largely because the publisher released only one thousand imprints, and most public libraries in the United States apparently overlooked its historical value and failed to purchase copies.23
Although Sáenz made his first entries on February 23 and 24, 1918, when he bid his family farewell, he declares the diary’s official start as February 25, the date he enlisted for military duty at New Braunfels, Texas. The diary omits only five days from its chronological entries between February 1918 and June 1919. In addition to introductory and concluding remarks that Sáenz wrote after the war, as he prepared the book for publication, the book includes photographs of fellow soldiers, battle scenes, towns, and US and European national leaders. The last chronological entry, recorded on June 21, 1919, announces his release from the military and mentions a visit with family in Alice. As Sáenz explains in his introduction to the volume, he intends the diary to be a record of military service and battlefield sacrifice that justifies claiming equal rights at home. It is a call to action based on the nation’s foundational principles of justice and democracy—principals the war had reinforced.
In between its first and last entries, the diary chronicles Sáenz’s movement through approximately three months of training at San Antonio’s Camp Travis, followed by a trip by rail to New York City, where he and his fellow soldiers boarded the steamship Olympic to cross the Atlantic. They arrived at Southampton, England, during the latter part of June. After crossing the English Channel, they passed by Paris and ended their journey in southeastern France, where they underwent additional training in preparation for battle in the northeastern part of the country. Sáenz and his buddies began seeing action in August and participated in two major battles at war’s end, the Saint-Mihiel offensive of September 12–15, 1918, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive of September 26–November 1, 1918. Once the fighting ended, in anticipation of the armistice signed on November 11, the 90th Division entered Luxembourg and Germany. After approximately four months in occupied territory, they swung back into France and headed for Saint-Nazaire. There, on May 28, 1919, they embarked on the steamship Mongolia to return to the United States. The ship reached Boston on June 7. After a six-day trip by rail, the soldiers arrived in San Antonio, where they were subsequently discharged.
During training at Camp Travis, Sáenz was assigned to headquarters as a clerical worker. This position provided a vantage point he uses effectively in the diary to anticipate and then narrate large-scale events, such as training plans and assignments, troop movements in Europe, coordinated activities with allied troops, the scale of fighting at the different fronts, and news of world events. His dedicated service, as well as his rapid learning of French, earned him intelligence and messenger assignments. In addition, he was responsible for teaching English to a class of fellow Mexican soldiers from Texas. His position at headquarters and his knowledge of Spanish, English, and French also made Sáenz a popular figure among the soldiers. They often asked him for help in writing letters to their loved ones, and they questioned him about the contents of the telegrams and other news arriving daily at headquarters from around the world.
Sáenz’s high-level assignments at headquarters were not without drawbacks, however. He reports witnessing unfair practices that colored his view of the military and reminded him of the discrimination Mexicans faced at home. One of his earliest such experiences occurred when his superiors at Camp Travis refused to grant the petition of an old and blind Mexican man who asked that one of his two sons be allowed to remain at home to care for him. Sáenz also reveals a keen sense of self-worth as he notes his growing irritation with superiors who fail to acknowledge his skills and dedication by promoting him to a rank commensurate with the demanding and skilled work he is regularly assigned to do. This lack of recognition and appreciation becomes especially unbearable when his application for admission to an officer training school is denied—twice—and without explanation. He remained a private throughout his military service.
Routes taken by Sáenz at the war front
Sáenz, who lived among the soldiers, provides accounts of their difficult day-to-day experiences, including forced marches, bloody battles, remarkable acts of heroism, terrifying deaths, hand-to-hand fighting, scouting missions conducted in the dead of night, constant back-and-forth shelling, and the sad, boring, and terrifying life in the trenches. He also describes the close relationships men developed amid the widespread carnage and devastation, the life and culture of local peasant communities, and the soldiers’ difficulties with haughty and unfair superiors. He describes the different kinds of Mexicans serving alongside him—the poor recruits from Texas farms, ranches, towns, and cities whose arduous working-class lives prepared them for the physical demands in the military, the illiterate and the well-schooled, the self-confident and uncertain recruits, the long-term foreign-born residents, the Americanized, and the large number of Spanish or bilingual speakers. Sáenz also discusses his numerous conversations with the Mexican soldiers, during which he usually is exhorting them to act honorably, fight bravely, and commit to the social cause back home.
Sáenz seems to have spoken to the Mexican soldiers with notable confidence, probably because of the deference they showed him. He was older and better-educated and possessed impressive reading and writing skills, as well as being a reliable conduit for news and information they valued greatly. Sáenz also assumed a leadership position that his fellow soldiers obviously accepted. This is especially evident in the response to his call for a gathering on March 2, 1919, during an extended encampment in Zeltingen, Germany. Fifty-one Mexican soldiers from the 360th Infantry Regiment showed up. As he visited with individuals and groups, Sáenz delivered the message that had prompted him to call for the meeting: Mexicans had faced discrimination at home and survived the fighting in Europe, but they now had the opportunity to use their improved standing as patriots to prepare for the cause for respect, dignity, and equal rights at home.
The gathering at Zeltingen led Sáenz to believe that his fellow Mexican soldiers would lead a popular social movement when they returned home. They did not. Instead, the returning veterans mostly involved themselves in the joy of coming home and in the time-consuming tasks required of them as they resumed their family responsibilities. The concluding section of Sáenz’s book reveals the magnitude of his disappointment. He offers a moving lamentation over the violent response by government troops in 1932 to the “Bonus Army” of over forty thousand destitute veterans and their families who camped in the nation’s capital to draw attention to their demand for payment of certificates issued to them by Congress in 1923.24 He surmises that the continuing discrimination against Mexicans in Texas and the reappearance of war clouds over Europe demonstrate that Americans, Texans, and Europeans do not appreciate the lessons of the war, including the service and sacrifice of Mexican soldiers. He also regrets the lack of support in the Mexican community for a statue to honor the Mexican soldiers in the war.
His harshest critiques appear in the epilogue. In some cases, the leadership in the Mexican community had failed to understand the historic opportunity the soldiers’ battlefield sacrifices offered. Sáenz aims his most vehement criticisms, however, at government officials who showed their insensitivity by denying veterans their promised bonus, and at society as a whole, for forgetting the soldiers’ wartime contributions. No doubt, his concluding thoughts are also colored by the Interior Department’s decision to reject his proposal that land and other resources be allotted to establish a Texas farming colony of Mexican American veterans. Still, showing his characteristic refusal to be completely daunted by disappointment or poor treatment, Sáenz closes with a reworking of an exhortation that appears throughout the diary: “We need more sacrifices and these offerings require more broad-minded men prepared to fight for the common good of our raza.”25
Sáenz’s prescription for sacrifices and broad-mindedness was not limited to his call for action on behalf of Mexicans in the United States. He also made note of the abject conditions of peasant life in France and Germany, prejudice and discrimination against African Americans and Native Americans, and the calamity of war that was threatening humanity in Europe. Sáenz, however, was not above the prejudice and narrow-mindedness that he condemned. He spoke disparagingly of Romani (Gypsies) and other poor people from Europe who had taken to begging and haggling over the price of goods they were selling to the soldiers. Sáenz also characterized Jewish merchants and peddlers in negative terms when he suggested that they were especially given to scheming ways. He also expressed discomfort when he saw women accompanying African-origin soldiers in Paris. Sáenz’s disparaging observations, however, were very limited, and they did not undermine his overall arguments and perspective related to military life, wartime experiences, and the cause for Mexican rights. They in fact stand in sharp contrast to his overall critique of prejudice and discrimination. Moreover, he was likely unaware of his own prejudices since he did not have a lived, personal experience with the people he disparaged. His critical views of Anglos in Texas, on the other hand, were based on lived experiences as a member of an aggrieved community, and this imbued him with a substantive critique of Anglo prejudice and discrimination in racial terms.
Fourteen years elapsed between Sáenz’s final diary entry and the book’s publication. His family responsibilities, along with his work commitments and political activities may account for much of this delay.26 Still, the length of time he spent preparing the diary for publication is sufficiently long to raise questions regarding the extent to which Sáenz revised the text of his original entries. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether an understandable concern for amending or modifying the narrative for the sake of clarity and consistency might have resulted in major alterations that would undermine the integrity of the diary as a firsthand account of experiences and events.
To address that concern, I compared Sáenz’s twenty-five postcard notes and twenty letters included among his personal papers with their corresponding entries in the published volume. The results of that comparison suggest a high degree of validity in the diary as the personal chronicle that it purports to be.27 Although he did occasionally revise the content of his original materials, Sáenz recognized his responsibility to maintain the integrity of the diary as a reliably close rendering of events and a consistently trustworthy document. This is especially evident in the verbatim appearance in the diary of the three articles he wrote for La Prensa while at the front.28 Sáenz made substantial revisions in only one document, a letter from a young pen pal named Robert E. Hoey, the original copy of which is in his archival collection. The letter appears in two places in the diary as revised copies of the original. This represents an inconsistency in an otherwise dependable narrative.29 Sáenz emphasizes his belief in the validity of the diary in his concluding remarks. He claims that he has met his responsibility of commemorative vigilance, that he has created a record of the extraordinary service and sacrifice achieved by the Mexican soldier, and that this witnessed account stands as a source of inspiration and a basis for recuperative justice.
READING SÁENZ
The veterans and their family members, including relatives of soldiers who did not return from the war, must have seen the diary as a valuable record and an evocative guide to their own and others’ experiences as young men in distant lands more than a dozen years earlier. Sáenz takes care to identify many of his fellow soldiers and to describe their warfront experiences, including the circumstances surrounding the death of some of his comrades. His frequent use of “we,” whether referring to Mexican soldiers or to the entire army of men, also underscores the war as a collective American experience that Mexican readers could claim in their own identification with the nation and their quest for equality. Sáenz’s references to the names and hometowns of the soldiers, as well as to the familiar Spanish-named bridges, streams, roads, and towns in Texas and his use of colloquial, archaic, and indigenous terms popular in Texas and Mexico would have encouraged Mexicans to read their community and their history into the narrative and to embrace Sáenz’s bold and even defiant method of inscribing their world onto the larger narrative of the war. Finally, his frequent references to sayings, literary works, and historical events from Mexico and Texas also reinforce a sense of community that earns recognition if not respect. Sáenz’s vast cultural repertoire, especially his command of history and literature, no doubt exceeded some readers’ comprehension, but these readers also may have accepted and even expected this from a learned and assertive person like Sáenz.
Moreover, Sáenz projects a sense of self-respect and righteousness his readers would have been likely to recognize and admire as an idealized cultural type—a larger-than-life man who always stood up to any Anglo who would dare question his integrity or deny him his rights. This image takes form as Sáenz records his confrontations with prejudiced Anglos in Texas and unfair officers in the military, as well as when he repeatedly refers to extraordinarily brave and principled figures in Mexico’s history. Sáenz also casts the racial tensions and conflicts prevalent in Texas in terms that favor Mexicans. A case in point is the story of a father and two sons—described by Sáenz as the Velázquez men—who refused military service because they had never been made to feel they were a part of the nation, but as draftees, they were now expected to fight on the country’s behalf. The ensuing shootout with local authorities results in the death of the father and one son, but their indifference and even opposition to the draft is understandable under the racialized circumstances Sáenz describes. In acknowledging an underlying resentment that often ran deep, Sáenz validates an alienated identity and justifies a common thread that binds the Mexican community together. It also lays the necessary groundwork for Sáenz to propose military service and sacrifice as the basis for a new form of unity and social incorporation that capitalizes on the nation’s reenergized principles of justice and democracy.
Some readers, of course, must have disagreed with Sáenz as they read the diary. The Mexicanists who reacted against Sáenz and his fellow Mexican Americanists in 1927, when the first efforts to launch LULAC were proposed at the Harlingen convention, for instance, may have interpreted the diary as an attempt to shore up citizenship claims with demonstrations of loyalty in the form of military service and battlefield sacrifice. Perales and Sáenz encouraged this view when they visited the offices of La Prensa on the eve of the publication of the diary. Perales reportedly praised the book for its treatment of Mexican American military service and sacrifice by men he considered loyal citizens: “Mexican Americans know how to meet their duties as citizens, including the supreme obligation to offer their lives in fulfillment of those responsibilities.”30
The newspaper’s readers would have been familiar with Perales’s advocacy of civil rights and recognized that his claim of entitlement was premised on constitutional guarantees to the US-born and the naturalized. They could also see that Sáenz was now binding the theoretical contract with a pen dipped in blood shed on European soil. Although readers of the diary would soon discover that Sáenz had not given US citizenship such importance, his silence when Perales made his pronouncement could have been misinterpreted as full acquiescence.
Allowing Perales to read US citizenship into the diary conformed to LULAC’s constitutional strategy and Sáenz’s commitment to it, but his book does not offer an outright endorsement of the strategy. Sáenz does, however, often attribute US nativity and citizenship to the soldiers by using the term Mexican American and by referring to some of the soldiers as having been born or raised in Texas. Sáenz also provides grist for the citizenship mill by criticizing Mexican-origin slackers. Such individuals prompt prejudiced Anglos to suspect all Mexicans of being disloyal to the United States. He also uses the term México Americanos in the diary’s title and encourages his readers to embrace a cause for equal rights that logically would lead to both political and cultural incorporation.
Sáenz’s moral and practical arguments on using warfront contributions to gain the incorporation of Mexicans into US society on an equal basis, however, stand on their own. He may have encouraged the readers of La Prensa to interpret the previously noted visit to the newspaper as allowing Perales to impose LULAC’s purpose on his writing, but he makes it clear throughout the diary that it is primarily intended as a record of the military service and sacrifice of all the Mexican recruits. His concern is that the same anti-Mexican attitude that has historically denied the Mexican community its rights in Texas will overlook the meaning behind the Mexican community’s response to the nation’s call to military service. Creating a written, published record, therefore, serves this higher purpose. The service and sacrifice that Sáenz recounts achieves greater importance as he repeatedly reminds his readers that US- and Mexico-born Mexicans who took part in the war did so despite the discriminatory treatment they had received in Texas.
Despite Sáenz’s efforts at describing the Mexican community as mostly unified in its response to the call to arms, he makes nativity and citizenship distinctions that conform to the views that many US-born civil rights leaders would later inscribe into LULAC. This no doubt reinforced social difference and inequality among Mexicans, as well as between Mexican immigrants and the larger nativist-minded population. Sáenz’s other possibly unintended masculinist approach to the telling of the Mexican war experience also shored up a gendered hierarchy, one that privileged Mexican men as the sole representatives of a Mexican military heritage who sacrificed everything for the Mexican community and the nation. Mexican men clearly made extraordinary contributions that could become currency to secure equal rights. Sáenz, however, pays little attention to women who made sacrifices of their own, including his wife, who assumed greater and largely unrecognized family and community responsibilities when the men went to war and resumed their unequal roles as the men returned from Europe armed with self-aggrandizing claims of heroism and sacrifice. Sáenz obviously assumed that wartime heroism and sacrifice was restricted to the men on the battlefield and that men would lead the cause for equal rights and that they would focus on the US-born and immigrants aspiring to be Americans, ideas that predominated in patriarchal and nativist regimes within and outside the Mexican community. These appear as the most obvious inconsistencies in an otherwise self-aware, inspiring, and even unpretentious account of wartime experiences.
Drawing a contrast between the dejected state of a socially submerged group at home and this same group’s distinguished record of military service abroad grants Mexicans a morally superior position that Sáenz uses to build his argument for equal rights. He uses a second technique when he juxtaposes the loyal Mexican-origin recruits with the undetermined number of both US- and Mexico-born Mexicans who avoided the draft by escaping to Mexico. Sáenz also advances the essentialist notion that Mexico’s history of wars and revolutions against colonial powers, foreign intruders, and conservative ideas, equips its people with a singular appreciation for the values of justice and democracy. The convergence of such possibilities with the historic opportunity to capitalize on the Allied spirit of democratic values now requires that Mexican-origin soldiers serve honorably and bravely to leverage change at home. Sáenz concludes that this type of service is precisely what the recruits had rendered.
Sáenz builds an even more elaborate edifice on the bedrock of military service and sacrifice. He suggests throughout the diary that Mexicans had earned a special place in the national project of forging a new nation on the restored principles of justice and democracy. He adds that the segregationists at home, some of whom are of German origin, are like their counterparts in Europe, men who violated these same civilizing values and caused great harm to entire nations, including their own. A fight against such evil forces at home requires that Mexicans ready themselves by promoting a truly patriotic social movement—namely, one that opposes discrimination and segregation.
Sáenz most often defines patriotism as a devotion to the principles of justice and democracy rather than an admiration for the flag or a jingoistic allegiance to the nation. In his view, high moral principles provide the basis both analogizing the cause for equal rights at home with the war against Germany, and for inverting the relationship between segregationists and advocates for expanded rights. Predicating a just cause for equal rights on military service and sacrifice reinforces a nation-building principle of just rewards for the nation’s soldiers and their communities.
Other writers whose works appeared in Spanish-language newspapers shared Sáenz’s observations on Mexicans in the military and applauded their individual sacrifices as expressions of their loyalty. Some of these writers included soldiers whose letters and articles appeared in the Spanish-language press as well as family members who recounted their own wartime sacrifice and admiration for the soldiers. However, today, Mexican Americans in the Great War is the only available work by a Mexican from the United States that provides a firsthand account of the war and the bravery of the Mexican soldiers as a basis for political action on behalf of their communities. Sáenz also stands apart from other writers in that excerpts from his highly elaborated narrative appeared in Spanish-language newspapers during and after the war.
Sáenz’s prescription for action, which emphasized military service and battlefield sacrifice, began to be advocated in newspaper articles and in speeches by other leaders. This trend became especially pronounced beginning on the eve of the US entry into World War II, as members of the so-called Mexican American generation of upwardly mobile, US-born Mexican leaders began to embrace the cause of the war as an expression of national loyalty and an opportunity to once again include wartime contributions in the civil rights agenda.31
Current readers of Sáenz’s diary can read his wartime account with an eye on its contributions to various histories. For instance, Sáenz’s explicit statements about military service and battlefield sacrifice as points of leverage in the cause for equal rights underscore the importance of the diary to the Mexican community, its history and the histories of other marginalized groups in US history. His own ability to recognize the importance of the war to minority rights and to offer sophisticated understandings on the political meaning and uses of military service and battlefield sacrifice also represents a valuable contribution to intellectual history and the troubled history of racial and class relations in Texas history. Sáenz’s account also stands as a thoughtful portrayal of military life and warfront experience that the common soldier endures. The war diary, in other words, expresses the spirit of foxhole solidarity, even as it calls for a good measure of empathy to be extended to the always brave Mexican soldiers, their community in the United States, and the “suffering humanity” in war-torn Europe that Sáenz laments.
A PERSONAL NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR
When I first read the diary in 1979, I was deeply impressed by its historical significance and promptly incorporated it into my university classes on Mexican American and Texas history. At the same time, though, I was amazed that no one else appeared to be engaging the diary as a record of singular importance for the study of Mexican, intellectual, Texas, and military history. I assumed that most scholars had overlooked the book because they were not proficient in Spanish. I then thought I might translate it. The diary deserved a distribution much wider than could be achieved by the few Spanish-language copies available in some US university libraries. My initial research on Sáenz led me to interview his sons and daughters. When I discovered that their father’s rich collection of personal papers had been saved (distributed among the siblings), I suggested they reassemble the collection and donate it to the Mexican American Library Program within the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, located at the University of Texas at Austin. Family members did this in 1989. My subsequent research in the Sáenz Papers, along with findings presented in a 1989 scholarly article by Carole E. Christian on Mexican soldiers from Texas, spurred me to edit and translate the diary.
I made a commitment to the project around 1996, when Mary Lenn Dixon, an editor at Texas A&M University Press, reviewed my proposal to translate Sáenz’s diary and offered an advance contract. Also, Fran Vick, a fellow Texas historian, editor, and generous benefactor, provided me with the necessary financial support to obtain the translating assistance of the late Ben Maya, a certified court interpreter and translator from Austin. I had translated about one-fifth of the diary in order to get a sense of the scope of the work that lay ahead. Ben conducted a first translation of the entire book while I edited its contents. I began revising the translated material as it became available from Ben. After I had completed at least five detailed revisions of the translated and edited version of Sáenz’s book, I wrote several drafts of the introduction, revising in response to suggestions from readers. Polishing the remainder of the manuscript also took time.32
I began to publish my research findings in 2002, with an essay in which I described Sáenz as a key intellectual who provided valuable philosophical justifications for the Mexican cause in Texas. I also devoted a section of my recent book to Sáenz’s important role in guiding this social movement in its transition from a Mexicanist, or inclusive political orientation, to a more narrow, Mexican Americanist identity and outlook. A forthcoming essay uses the concept of autobiographical consciousness to explain Sáenz’s political philosophy and views.33
Despite my early confidence-building research and writing about Sáenz, I did not fully grasp the magnitude of the work the diary project would involve. The book’s sheer length and small font size, the arduous task of identifying rare sources, and the difficulties of translating a variety of forms of communication, as well as accurately rendering the meaning of colloquial, archaic, and indigenous terms and sayings, posed serious challenges. Tracking down basic information about the numerous places, people, and events mentioned in the diary required research and the addition of explanatory notes. Finally, as I discovered, translating the meanings embedded in esoteric words and complex idioms no longer in use requires developing explanations that go far beyond a literal rendition of a text.
I am aware of the pivotal role I play as a translator and editor, orchestrating an exchange between subjectivities across a cultural divide that separates the historical moment when Sáenz put pen to paper and my own very different time and place. Inevitably, my surroundings and sensibilities influenced how I have interpreted the meanings he gave his words. To put this a little differently, translating Sáenz’s diary places me in the position of a mediator with a special determining role in interpreting observations, thoughts, and opinions. I believe my professional training in history, Spanish, and literature; my record of research and writing in Mexican American and Texas history; and my cultural citizenship in the Mexican community of Texas combine to make me especially sensitive to the language and meanings in the diary. It is my hope that these attributes have resulted in a form of coauthorship that reveals and celebrates the creative work of Sáenz while also acknowledging my own interventions and embedded interpretations.
My effort to bring Sáenz’s work to a broad audience is tied directly to my personal and professional interests. I am a socially engaged scholar who conducts research in Mexican history to explain the persistence of class and racial inequalities and to draw attention to the organized initiatives to ameliorate and change conditions that contribute to this problem. I have translated the diary because I recognize Sáenz’s masterful critique of these inequalities, his bold reconfiguration of the Mexican cause, and his sensitive treatment of Mexican people and their veterans. I also admire his expansive and far-reaching statements about a shared Mexican history and culture and his ability to speak prophetically about a Mexican cause that continues to draw on the United States’ foundational principles to justify itself.
The candid historian that I am requires that I admit an uncertainty about Sáenz. I am not able to fully understand the source of his extraordinary insight and bold judgment. I appreciate his keen intellect and ability to assemble and then present an array of ideas as coherent, effective arguments—and often to do so in indifferent or even hostile settings. Similarly, I am not surprised by his mastery of the Spanish language and Mexican history and culture. Here and elsewhere, I have credited his good schooling and mentoring in Alice, along with his studious nature and determined personality, to explain his analytical skills and self-assuredness. I have also suggested that loving parents and a hardscrabble life in Realitos equipped Sáenz with knowledge of the difficulties Mexicans faced in Texas and a moral compass that helped him find his bearings. These explanations, however, fall short of providing a comprehensive understanding of Sáenz, even when only the merits of his diary are under consideration.
His prescient ability to see the war as an opportunity to advance the Mexican cause seems to defy satisfactory explanation. Accounting for the strength of his confidence about his righteous purpose is equally difficult. What made Sáenz strong enough to leave home, give up a relatively secure source of employment, and place himself in harm’s way? Was it only chance that brought the fortuitous confluence of a war, with its democratizing influence in the United States, a minority community in search of social redemption, a band of brave and daring brothers in the battlefields of Europe, and a person of rare intellect, internal fortitude, and caring nature who could chronicle their experiences as a statement of righteous protest and visionary argument? It may never be possible to address everything of importance in Sáenz’s life, nor to explain it fully and adequately. This in no way detracts from the indisputable fact that his contributions to history and leadership in his community are enormous. And this fact alone makes his diary worth reading.
EMILIO ZAMORA
